Noura

by Heather Raffo

About the Play

What does “home” mean and what will we do to protect it?

Noura challenges our notions of modern marriage and motherhood through a portrait of Iraqi immigrants living in New York. As Noura and her husband Tareq prepare to celebrate their first Christmas as American citizens, she looks forward to welcoming a special guest—Maryam, a young Iraqi refugee. But the girl’s arrival upends the family, forcing them to confront where they are, where they’ve been and who they have become.

In this world-premiere production, award-winning playwright and performer Heather Raffo (Nine Parts of Desire) draws on personal stories of Arab American women responding to A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen’s classic drama of one mother’s quest to balance her duty with her identity.

If you’re interested in a list of accessible performances, you can find a calendar here.

Heather Raffo (Playwright)

Heather Raffo is an award-winning playwright and actress whose work has been seen Off-Broadway, off West End, in regional theatre and in film. She is the author and solo performer of the play Nine Parts of Desire (Lucille Lortel Award, Susan Smith Blackburn commendation, Drama League, OCC, Helen Hayes nominations), which the New Yorker called “an example of how art can remake the world.” The play ran Off-Broadway for nine months and has played across the United States and internationally for over a decade, with current productions in Greece, Hungary and India. Heather’s newest play, Noura, just won Williamstown Theatre Festival’s prestigious Weissberger Award.

Recently, her libretto for the opera Fallujah was heard as part of Kennedy Center’s International Theater Festival. It then received its world premiere at Long Beach Opera in March of 2016 and opened at New York City Opera later that year. A film was made of the opera, as well as a documentary titled Fallujah: Art, Healing and PTSD.

Raffo is the recipient of multiple grants from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to use theatre as a means of bridge-building between her Eastern and Western cultures. She continues to grow her storytelling workshop, Places of Pilgrimage, taking it to universities and community centers both in America and the Middle East. Clips of participants’ work from her New York workshop have been shared online through the organizations Bridges of Understanding and Refugees Deeply, as a means to connect the stories of young Middle Eastern women with their peers globally. Raffo continues her focus on cross-cultural work by speaking at universities across America and internationally. Her work has taken her from classrooms in Tampa to the U.S. Islamic World Forum in Qatar, and from the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati to the Rumi Festival in Oslo. She is a proud member of Epic Theatre Ensemble’s Artistic Advisory Council and prizes her decade long collaboration with Georgetown’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics. WEB: Facebook: Heather Raffo; Twitter: @heatherraffo; HeatherRaffo.com.